flac-opt (free lossless audio codec) flac is open source software that can reduce the amount of storage space needed to store digital audio signals without needing to remove information in doing so. This version of flac is newer than the one included in Slackware, and is installed in /opt/flac-opt so it won't conflict with Slackware's flac package. The main reason for using this is that this newer version of flac supports multithreaded encoding (via the -j option), which speeds up the process dramatically. Even without using -j, encodes about 25% faster than Slackware's flac. Decoding speed is the same (and can't use multiple threads), so recompiling e.g. media player apps to use this version of flac doesn't make sense. After the package is installed, either log out & back in, or run "source /etc/profile.d/flac-opt.sh" to put the new flac and metaflac commands in your PATH. flac-opt.sh is installed +x by default. SlackBuild developers: if you're writing a SlackBuild that needs the flac libraries in this package, put this somewhere near the top of your build script (after the "set -e"): source /etc/profile.d/flac-opt-dev.sh The -dev file is not installed executable, to avoid conflicting with the standard flac libraries. It can also be sourced in an interactive shell, if needed, but DO NOT "chmod +x" this file. By default, flac-opt is built with assembly language optimizations. If you get "illegal instruction" errors at runtime, rebuild the package with ASM=no in the environment. This should only happen on elderly (first-generation) x86_64 hardware, such as the original Athlon64. By default, flac-opt is built with upstream's default C optimization, which is -O3. There's no reason this should bother anyone... but if it does, you can built with FORCE_O2=yes in the environment.